On Monday, May 6, 2013, the DCA held a special luncheon to celebrate our amazing student workers and the incredible amount of work they have completed this school year.

And it was a truly astounding amount of work they accomplished. Here are a few stats:

403 new record cartons processed and sent off-site

502 reference questions answered

12,372 Engineering student folders cataloged

16,084 Transcripts cataloged

5,710 Publications in the Center for Health, Environment and Justice (CHEJ) collection cataloged

Sadly, the end of the school year also means that many of the students will be leaving us. We will greatly miss Mae Humiston who is graduating on May 19th. Mae has been a student employee at the DCA throughout her time at Tufts, and we can’t believe four years have already flown by! Not only is Mae an outstanding student employee, but she is an incredible human being. The staff of the DCA is so proud of her and the work she has done on campus around sustainable food production, recycling, and issues of justice and equality. We will miss her, but we know that she will continue to do so much good as she goes out into the world.

Also, graduating are several of our Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science students. Sarah Gustafson, Molly Bruce, and Erin Faulder are finishing up their library degrees this spring. The DCA has been very fortunate to be able to bring Erin on in a staff position, so we won’t be saying good-bye to her any time soon. However, Molly will be moving on to an internship in Austria and Sarah will be moving to Rhode Island by the end of the summer. CHEJ, Accion, Edward R. Murrow, the new CIDER collection management system – these are all collections and projects which could not have been undertaken without these three and as they graduate, the staff of the DCA is proud to have them as colleagues and valuable members of our profession.

Those are our graduates, but we also want to acknowledge our other student employees:

Bridget Boyle

Lancy Downs

Tiffany Locke

Elizabeth McGorty

Misako Ono

Lydia Puzzullo

Tim Walsh

Morgan VanClief

Krista Zegura

And we would also like to acknowledge the staff working on the New Nation Votes grant project:

The students are back! It’s hard to talk about the past, when right now I’m so excited about what we are planning for the future here in the DCA. (Super secret hint: it’s going to be AWESOME.)

But I guess the incoming freshmen can be grateful they’re no longer required to wear beanies. The rules were part of a hazing tradition enforced by the sophomore class and persisted until the 1960s.

The brown and blue beanies could be purchased at the Tufts bookstore, and were to be worn at all times unless otherwise posted. Students were required to doff their beanies when meeting the president or members of the faculty.